Resnicow + Associates

Ragnar Kjartansson's First Exhibition in Argentina and "Auto Body," an International Platform for Women Artists Working in Video and Performance

Posted:

30 April 2015

Event Date:

31 May 2015

Buenos Aires, Argentina

FAENA ART presents two distinct but related exhibitions, opening to the public on May 31, 2015 at Faena Art Center Buenos Aires (FAC), which demonstrate the power of performing bodies, in both physical and digital forms, to explore temporality and the role of gender in contemporary art and performance.

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel, life-size video installation, The Visitors (2012), will occupy the entirety of FAC’s Sala Catedral and marks the first time Kjartansson’s work has been exhibited in Buenos Aires. Featuring eight individual performers and an eclectic choir performing the same song captured in one continuous take, The Visitors is a hymn to the feminine and its melancholic triumph. The exhibition is Ragnar Kjartansson’s first in Argentina and also marks the first institutional collaboration between FAENA ART and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), led by Founder and Chairwoman Francesca von Habsburg.

Opening concurrently in the exhibition space above The Visitors is “Auto Body,” an exhibition of more than 40 women artists working in video and performance who use the body and performativity as platforms to address political and economic inequalities in the art world and beyond. Following its debut in December 2014 in Miami Beach, the exhibition makes its first international stop in Buenos Aires and incorporates works by 10 Argentine artists selected by three local curators—fostering a dialogue between women curators and artists on both a local and international level. By heightening the presence of women’s physical and digital bodies in an exhibition and performance space, “Auto Body” focuses attention on the marked absence of women artists in many areas of the art world.